10

England

Peter Marshall

Historians’ understanding of the weave of political, cultural, and religious developments that can still usefully be called the English Reformation has changed in important ways in the quarter-century since Paul Seaver skillfully surveyed the field for the 1982 Reformation research guide. New sources have been opened up, new interpretations have been applied to old sources, and a new chronology for the topic is starting to emerge. In 1982, Seaver warned that “if we see the English Reformation as still an ongoing process until the godly lost their hope for the reform of Church and State…we will find ourselves incorporating into a single process what [A. G.] Dickens with some reason has dubbed ‘the second Reformation’ of the mid-seventeenth century.”¹ In large measure, this has now come to pass: the English Reformation, once an exclusively mid-Tudor business, has become a “long Reformation” and a process, not an event.²

Important interpretative shifts were already starting to become visible by the late 1970s. For over a decade, A. G. Dickens’s 1964 survey, The English Reformation, had seemed to most observers to be a near definitive account. Dickens departed from the dominant “Reformation as act of state” interpretation of the earlier twentieth century, stressing instead its credentials as a genuine religious movement and its substantial achievements by the middle of the sixteenth century. He effectively finished his account with the Elizabethan settlement of 1559. While steering clear of the open anti-Catholic bias that had marked some earlier studies, Dickens’s account was in many ways heir to a Protestant narrative that had emerged in the Reformation period itself. He evinced limited sympathy for the pre-Reformation church and stressed the prevalence of anticlericalism and humanist criticism in preparing the ground for the actions of Henry VIII.³

A full-scale revisionist assault on the hegemony of Dickens began with Christopher Haigh’s study of Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire, a book with rather more to say about resistance than it does about reformation. In Haigh’s view, the church before the 1530s commanded very widespread popular allegiance, Protestantism only ever made a small number of converts, and Catholic practices long continued in defiance of the law. In subsequent articles, Haigh sought to show that the model was broadly similar for other parts of the country outside London. Almost everywhere there seemed to be complaints from Protestant clergy that the people were unteachable and church court records throughout the country revealed the longevity of Catholic customs well into the reign of Elizabeth. Protestantism, it seemed, was simply unsuited to making much genuine progress in a largely illiterate, agricultural society. Protestant teaching, based around long sermons and catechism classes, was too demanding (and too dull) for a population accustomed to the colorful rituals of Catholicism, and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination (the official theology of the Elizabethan church) was an unattractive one.⁴ In a general survey of 1993, Haigh made the memorable suggestion that the Reformation may eventually have succeeded in “creating a Protestant nation, but not a nation of Protestants.”⁵

Haigh’s was not for long a lone voice. Powerful support came in 1982 when the prestigious Ford lectures in Oxford were given by J. J. Scarisbrick, hitherto best known as the biographer of Henry VIII. Scarisbrick’s thesis was that “English men and women did not want the Reformation and most of them were slow to accept it when it came.”⁶ He painted a vibrant picture of religious life in pre-Reformation England, devoting a chapter, for example, to a theme entirely neglected by Dickens: the guilds, or voluntary religious brotherhoods, that thrived in most English parishes until they were put down in the late 1540s.⁷ Scarisbrick’s book was controversial, though the picture received broad endorsement from a series of local and regional studies. Even in London, as Susan Brigden demonstrated, Catholic sentiment remained strong and the Reformation was no walkover.⁸ It was not until the mid-1990s, however, that the revisionist cause seemed to be sweeping all before it. In 1992 Eamon Duffy applied both immense theological learning and profound historical imagination to what is probably the most important book yet to be written on pre-Reformation religion, The Stripping of the Altars. The book is a diptych: the first half describes religious life in English parishes in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the second half, the impact of the Reformation on parish religion up to 1580. An extraordinary range and volume of primary evidence—in particular, the vernacular religious output of the early printing press—is deployed to demonstrate widespread devotion to the mass and sacraments of the Catholic Church, huge financial investment in church building and church furnishings, the great popularity of saints’ cults and pilgrimage, and an almost universal concern with praying for the souls of the dead. The Reformation itself appears as an immensely destructive force, sweeping away all kinds of practices and ideas that had exhibited no signs of preemptive decay. It is moving and tragic.⁹

The effect of what some commentators have not hesitated to call “Catholic revisionism”¹⁰ has been to deal a fatal blow to Whiggish and progressivist narratives of the early Reformation in England. Although the emphasis in Haigh’s, Scarisbrick’s, and Duffy’s work is on lay and parish religion with little attention to such topics as the religious orders, a recent trend has been toward the rehabilitation of the institutions as well as the devotional ethos of the pre-Reformation church.¹¹ Even Cardinal Wolsey, for long the exemplar of late medieval ecclesiastical corruption, has received sympathetic reinterpretation as a serious-minded and humanist-influenced reformer, as well as for his allegedly sensible and pragmatic response to the emerging Lutheran threat in the 1520s.¹²

Yet all is not quite quiet on the early Reformation front. The significance of Lollardy and the nature of the contribution it was able to make to the first stirrings of the Reformation remains an interpretative flashpoint and a focus of lively research. Here an interpretation that regards late medieval Lollardy as an essentially fragmentary, incoherent, and numerically weak phenomenon, hardly deserving the epithet “movement,” remains pitted against a more optimistic view that stresses organizational networks, the preservation of a Wycliffite doctrinal inheritance, and the growing ability of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Lollardy to make converts across the social scale.¹³ There is a growing awareness that the lines between heresy and orthodoxy were blurred in the immediately pre-Reformation decades: suspected Lollards used orthodox vernacular texts, attended church, and served as churchwardens; educated and pious Catholics sometimes possessed copies of the unsanctioned Wycliffite Bible and were capable of searing anticlerical critiques. But Lollardy is not merely a historians’ construct: R. G. Davies has identified the crucial importance of personal and family connections rather than formal doctrine in sustaining Lollardy (“if Wycliffism was what you knew, Lollardy was who you knew”), and Shannon McSheffrey rightly stresses the issue of authority—Lollards were those, irrespective of the precise content of their beliefs, who consciously rejected the religious superintendence of the hierarchy and priesthood.¹⁴

The debates over Lollardy will continue, though they will remain in some ways peripheral to a more pressing question thrown up by the increasingly normative revisionist paradigm. If traditional Catholicism was so well integrated into community life, commanding high levels of both financial and emotional investment, how does one account for the relative ease with which successive mid-Tudor governments were able to dismantle the system? Christopher Marsh has termed this the “compliance conundrum.”¹⁵ The question is sharpened by a growing recognition of just how radical the Henrician, Edwardian, and Elizabethan reformations were in their impact on popular religious practice and the fabric of churches. Margaret Aston’s meticulous scholarship on the theory and practice of iconoclasm has illuminated a religious environment in sixteenth-century England that was much more hostile to sacred imagery than that in Lutheran Germany or even Zwinglian Zürich.¹⁶ The intensity of the assault on another central pillar of late medieval Catholicism—prayer for the dead in purgatory—has also recently come under the spotlight.¹⁷

Revisionist scholars are apt to point to the coercive power of the Tudor state, though others have not found this to be a fully satisfactory explanation. Could there have been, despite the undoubted popular commitment to pre-Reformation belief and practice, a paradoxical sense of relief among people as the officially driven Reformation removed the potentially burdensome obligations of fasting, mandatory confession, and intercessory prayer? Marsh and Alec Ryrie have suggested so.¹⁸ Colin Richmond, George Bernard, and Peter Marshall have, in different ways, pointed to the possibility of growing fissures between elite and popular religious mind-sets at the close of the Middle Ages, which may have encouraged the educated and landed classes (from Henry VIII downward) to collude in the destruction of aspects of traditional religion, such as saints’ cults, shrines, and pilgrimage, even if they did not always impel them to adopt reforming ideas.¹⁹ That such collaboration may have been the accompaniment to religious change at all social levels is the main theme of a 2003 book by Ethan Shagan (though he is inclined to emphasize material inducements rather than idealistic conviction): the opportunity to acquire monastic assets and chantry lands, or to be able to smear a quarrelsome neighbor as a papist. The English Reformation, Shagan suggests, was “not done to people, it was done with them.”²⁰ Yet too insistent a focus on compliance risks obscuring the extent to which the Reformation was resisted on the ground and in the parishes. A major lacuna of the scholarship of a generation ago—a proper study of the Northern Rebellions of 1536–37—has now been plugged by the labors of Michael Bush and Richard Hoyle.²¹ The smaller-scale but still highly significant Catholic rebellions of 1549 and 1569 await similarly close investigation.²²

In the wake of revisionist rehabilitation of traditional Catholicism and anguished considerations of popular response to official reform, the study of early Protestantism itself was threatening to become a moribund field. But there are hopeful signs here. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial biography of Thomas Cranmer has brought a key figure into sharp focus, and a recent collection of essays has emphasized the variety and creativity of heterodox religious expression in the first half of the sixteenth century.²³ The tenor of much current work here is to point to the fluidity of religious positions in what was effectively a pre-confessional age. For the first half of the sixteenth century at least, “Protestant” is an anachronistic term, and “evangelical” better conveys a sense both of the linkages to pre-Reformation culture and of the nondenominational character of a fissiparous movement for religious renewal.²⁴

A recognition that there was no preordained denominational outcome to the early Reformation years offers the prospect for fruitful reassessment of the religious politics of the period. The nature and directions of Henrician reform, and the parameters of Henry’s personal religion, have been the subject of lively debate. Where some scholars see the ebb and flow of factional conflicts around the opinionated idiosyncrasies of an unpredictable monarch, others detect the working out of a coherent middle way in religious policy, one that looks anomalous only from later confessionalized perspectives.²⁵ Yet even at his imperious best, Henry was not the sole author of religious policy: a key restraining influence was the conservative bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner.²⁶ On the evangelical side, Henry’s second queen, Anne Boleyn, has emerged as a major patroness of reform in her own right, rather than merely the femme fatale of the English Reformation.²⁷ With the possible exception of Cranmer, however, there is little doubt that the most important ally of the evangelicals in the upper reaches of the Henrician state was Thomas Cromwell. The former doyen of Tudor political history, G. R. Elton, regarded Cromwell as an essentially secular and modernizing figure, architect of a Tudor “revolution in government,” or at best, as someone who regarded religious reform as a means to an end.²⁸ But more recent work has made a compelling case for Cromwell’s real ideological commitment.²⁹ Remarkably, there is still no substantial scholarly life of the man who must on any reckoning count as one of the half dozen most influential politicians of the century. By contrast, biographies of Cromwell’s heroic adversary Thomas More, both admiring and iconoclastic, have continued to roll off the presses in the last two decades: John Guy’s recent study achieves a kind of synthesis.³⁰

Neither Cromwell nor More lived to see the fulfillment of hopes, or the realization of nightmares, in the heady years of Edward VI’s reign. In 1982, Seaver noted that work by Michael Bush, Barrett Beer, and Dale Hoak was revising the reputations of the dukes of Somerset (negatively) and Northumberland (positively), but also observed that these historians “have given scant attention to the Edwardian religious Reformation.”³¹ This has started to change. Viewed negatively in the work of revisionist historians like Duffy and Haigh (the former sees it as ideologically driven and ruthlessly destructive; the latter, as patchy and pragmatic), Edwardian religious policy is now being assessed more sympathetically on its own terms. Catharine Davies has analyzed Edwardian Protestant thought to find an internally coherent, if occasionally rather paranoid, “Reformation of the Word.”³² Diarmaid MacCulloch’s superb account gives due prominence to the zealous iconoclasm implied by Edward’s ascribed role as a Josiah-figure, but integrates this with consideration of another biblical prototype, Solomon, builder of the temple. In other words, the Edwardian regime was embarked on a coherent program of cleansing the realm in order to establish a reformed commonwealth, and MacCulloch partially rehabilitates Somerset as the “good duke” who was genuinely concerned with social and economic reform. The tensions between moderately cautious reformers such as Cranmer and Nicholas Ridley, and proto-Puritans such as John Hooper, were disagreements over the pace rather than the substance of reform, over means rather than ends.³³ A further important aspect of MacCulloch’s approach is his insistence on the internationalism of mid-Tudor Protestantism. Far from being an insular process (geared ultimately toward the evolution of something called Anglicanism), the Edwardian reformation positioned itself at the heart of a beleaguered European Protestant movement. Cranmer maintained close relations with the great networker of the Reformed Protestant world, Heinrich Bullinger of Zürich. In this area, MacCulloch’s work complements that of Andrew Pettegree, who has highlighted the importance of the London stranger churches, as well as the myriad international connections of English Protestants under Mary.³⁴

Just how historians should assess the short reign of Mary Tudor (1553–58) has become perhaps the most gaping fault line in the current historiography. The traditional interpretation (first fully articulated in the sixteenth century by the martyrologist John Foxe) is firmly established in the English historical psyche: the efforts by Queen Mary—“Bloody Mary”—to reverse the progress of the Reformation were a doomed attempt to reverse the inexorable tide of history, and her cruel persecution of Protestants merely united the nation in a hatred of Spain and of Catholicism. In a slightly (though not greatly) nuanced version, this was Dickens’s characterization of the reign as “the Marian reaction.” But the revisionists’ thoroughgoing reassessment of the state of the Catholic Church in the 1520s has inevitably undermined the old assumption that there could be but little popular support for a Catholic restoration in the succeeding generation. Haigh, Duffy, and Jennifer Loach have found much evidence of popular enthusiasm for the restoration of the mass and other sacraments in 1553, and are inclined to regard the defeat of Northumberland’s attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne as the outcome of an overtly Catholic (and for once successful) rebellion.³⁵ Other historians, however, hold to a more traditional view that Mary fatally misinterpreted dynastic loyalism as ideological support.³⁶ Whereas Dickens identified Mary’s tragedy as her having “failed to discover the Counter-Reformation,” revisionists point to an apparent shift in the devotional priorities of Marian Catholicism away from the luxuriant growth of the late Middle Ages toward a more parochially and sacramentally centered style of worship, as well as to official initiatives (such as the planned establishment of diocesan seminaries) that in crucial respects actually anticipated the reforms of the Council of Trent.³⁷ The much-derided Spanish influence on Marian Catholicism appears in some accounts as modernizing and theologically creative.³⁸ Even the notorious failure of Cardinal Pole to accept Ignatius Loyola’s offer of Jesuits to work in England is now seen as good sense, rather than shortsightedness.³⁹

It is hard to spend much time surveying the Marian scene without contemplating a blunt counterfactual question: if Mary had lived longer, or been able to secure a Catholic heir, could the Reformation have been permanently reversed in England? For all the undoubted difficulties the regime encountered—the financial problems of the church, the scale of hostility to the Spanish marriage, the political disaster of the accession of the virulently anti-Habsburg Pope Paul IV in 1555—it is now impossible to answer this with an emphatic negative. Nonetheless, it remains true that revisionist accounts of the reign have tended to gloss over the least attractive aspect of official religious policy, the burnings of around three hundred Protestant men and women beginning in February 1555. Yet, thanks largely to the impact of John Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes, it was principally for this that the reign would be remembered. In laying the foundations for a long tradition of popular and official anti-Catholicism, the Marian persecution was of immense cultural and political significance. Since 1993 a collaborative research project has been preparing accurate and annotated editions of the four editions of the Actes and Monuments published in Foxe’s lifetime (displacing the unreliable Victorian editions of Foxe on which scholars have previously generally relied). This will undoubtedly continue to serve as a stimulus to research, not just on Foxe, but also on the religion and politics of his age.⁴⁰

The accession of Elizabeth in 1558 and her church settlement of the following year, were once regarded as the happy final destination of the English Reformation. It now seems barely a midway point on the journey. Historians have moved far from the perspective that enabled Dickens to view the religious tensions of Elizabeth’s reign merely as “residual problems.”⁴¹ A new agenda for research here was heralded, not by Catholic revisionists, but by the leading historian of later sixteenth-century Protestantism, Patrick Collinson. In 1988 Collinson wrote that he was now prepared to assert “crudely and flatly, that the Reformation was something which happened in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.”⁴² The insight reflected a seminal category shift among Reformation historians, away from the legislative framework and toward the complex social processes by which England acquired a Protestant culture.

Yet readings of the legislative process itself have been thrown wide open in the past two decades. It had long been axiomatic that the purpose and result of the 1559 Acts of Uniformity and Supremacy was to create a consensual, Anglican via media (middle way) between the excesses of Rome and Geneva, though J. E. Neale had (as it seemed) convincingly argued in the 1950s that Elizabeth was forced into a more Protestant settlement than she desired by returning Puritan exiles in parliament.⁴³ In the early 1980s studies by Winthrop Hudson and Norman Jones turned this interpretation on its head, casting doubt on the existence of a supposed Puritan choir in the House of Commons and arguing that Elizabeth was all along aiming for a thoroughly Protestant settlement, though one nearly derailed by Catholic opposition in the Lords.⁴⁴ More recently, the pendulum has swung partway back, with assertions that Elizabeth was maneuvered into a Protestant position by her own chief minister William Cecil, rather than by Puritan parliamentarians.⁴⁵ This certainly helps to account for the “thus far and no further” attitude the queen subsequently adopted in religious matters. Though attempts to penetrate to the heart of Elizabeth’s sphinxlike personal religion are inevitably speculative, there is no question that, unlike the majority of her bishops and advisers, she saw the settlement of 1559 as a terminus, rather than a way station to further reform.⁴⁶

Those pressing hardest for further reformation of the liturgy and structures of the church have conventionally been called Puritans, in contradistinction to Anglican defenders of the Elizabethan establishment.⁴⁷ This now looks unconvincing. “Anglicanism” (the word and the thing) is an anachronism in a late-sixteenth-century context, when the vast majority of English churchmen saw themselves simply as Protestants and, moreover, as part of the Reformed family of European churches. In terms of theology, scholars like Collinson and Nicholas Tyacke have argued that a Calvinist consensus prevailed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean (or, as it is sometimes termed, Jacobethan) church. Collinson in particular has made a compelling case for seeing Puritans not as members of an oppositional movement but merely as the “hotter sort” of Protestants, whose attitudes and aspirations were in many ways close to the mainstream.⁴⁸ Yet the nature and potential of Puritanism remain controversial.⁴⁹ While accepting the broad outlines of the Collinsonian model, Peter Lake in particular has laid emphasis on the theological fractiousness of Puritans driven by a distinctively introspective adherence to the doctrine of predestination.⁵⁰ Collinson too, in later work, has amply recognized the socially divisive character of Puritanism, emphasizing, as social historians tend to do, its attacks against popular festive culture in a reformation of manners.⁵¹

Puritans termed themselves “the godly,” but historians have become increasingly sensitized to the fact that their local opponents were not necessarily the ungodly. The religion of the conformist majority of the population has come under the microscope, despite the inherent difficulties of studying people whose behavior by definition leaves little mark in the disciplinary record.⁵² Judith Maltby has identified a seam of “Prayer Book Protestants” in England’s parishes—people committed to the institution of episcopacy and the rhythms of Cranmer’s liturgies, and opposed equally to Puritan nonconformity (over issues such as the wearing of surplices) and to Laudian innovation in the 1630s.⁵³ Christopher Haigh prefers the label “parish anglicans” and doubts that such people had internalized the Protestant message in any meaningful way. He further suggests that pressure from instinctive conservatives in the localities served to blunt the Protestant message of the preachers.⁵⁴ Ian Green’s herculean surveys of English print culture in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries find the best-selling items among both catechisms and other religious works to reflect the emergence of a broad consensual Protestantism (akin to the “unspectacular orthodoxy” that Martin Ingram sees being upheld by lay cooperation with the church courts). Others have questioned whether the methodology of focusing only on works in multiple editions is likely to create a false impression of harmony and consensus in the world of print.⁵⁵

Increasingly it is to printed text, rather than to manuscript, that historians are turning in attempts to gauge the religious temperature of Protestant England—a trend likely to be encouraged by the current wide availability of the digitalized texts of EEBO (Early English Books Online). Seaver’s complaint in 1982 that the “popular literature which historians have readily to hand has been largely neglected” is no longer valid.⁵⁶ A pioneering work here was Tessa Watt’s survey of religious themes in ballads and chapbooks up to 1640. She found there a patchwork of beliefs that “may be described as distinctively ‘post-Reformation,’ but not thoroughly ‘Protestant.’”⁵⁷ Characteristic of such post-revisionist studies is an emphasis on the paradoxical success of the Reformation through its linkages to the unreformed past. David Cressy and Ronald Hutton have traced the laying of a Protestant and nationalistic calendar of seasonal celebrations on top of the old cycle of saints’ days.⁵⁸ Alexandra Walsham has identified a pervasive interest in divine providences as a point of connection between Protestant elites and the long-held assumptions of the people, and Peter Marshall has found continuities, as well as sharp caesuras, in attitudes toward commemoration of the dead and the afterlife.⁵⁹ None of these approaches confirms the impression, once familiar from the work of Keith Thomas, Christopher Hill, and Peter Clark, of widespread ignorance, irreverence, or skepticism toward orthodox religion on the part of the common people.⁶⁰ Indeed, in his insightful analyses of murder pamphlets Peter Lake has found distinctly godly themes in the most sensational productions of the yellow press.⁶¹

An overdue attention to religious conformists is fortunately not diverting attention from the most conspicuous nonconformists on the Elizabethan and early Stuart religious scene: the Catholics. In the past, Catholic history was usually the preserve of (often amateur) practitioners from within the tradition itself, confined to the margins by mainstream accounts of the Reformation process (one of Dickens’s “residual problems”). But Catholicism is at last beginning to be integrated into the master narrative of religious and political change. In the late 1970s and 1980s John Bossy and Christopher Haigh argued over whether Elizabethan Catholicism was characterized by continuity or discontinuity with the medieval and Marian past, but both agreed that by the end of the reign it had settled down to become a small and inward-looking seigneurial sect under the protection of the Catholic gentry, posing little threat to the stability of the Protestant regime.⁶² Newer approaches make this view problematic. Michael Questier’s work on conversion shows considerable numbers of individuals passing in and out of allegiance to Rome, and numerous families divided by religion. Both he and Peter Lake have studied the internal politics of English Catholicism—especially tensions over how far Catholics could compromise with the demands of the state—and have found the Protestant régime and its agents more than ready to fish in these troubled waters.⁶³

Perhaps the most important development in recent studies of Catholicism is a recognition that Catholicism and recusancy are not two words for the same thing. The small minority of recusants who refused to go to Church of England services were complemented by an amorphous body of church papists who attended in accordance with the law. The suggestion of Bossy and others that church papistry was a transitional phase that had effectively run its course by the end of Elizabeth’s reign has been effectively questioned by Alexandra Walsham, Bill Sheils, and others, who note the ability of Catholics to move in and out of formal conformity as political and personal circumstances dictated—something they observe happening well into the seventeenth century.⁶⁴

The prevalence and persistence of church papistry helps to account for a crucial phenomenon of early modern religious culture, one to which historians are devoting close attention: its pervasive anti-Catholicism.⁶⁵ In some ways antipopery was a culturally and politically unifying force. Protestants closed ranks in the face of an international threat headed by the papacy, which virtually all respectable theologians identified with the Antichrist foretold in scripture.⁶⁶ But there was a potentially crucial fault line between those who adopted a legalistic definition of popery as obedience to Rome, and the godly reformers apt to regard any lapse from strict Calvinist orthodoxy as tantamount to the same thing. Puritans saw popery as a pervasive, metaphysical force, liable at any time to infect the structure and ceremonies of the Church of England itself.⁶⁷

By the 1630s, significant numbers of English people had come to believe that this had happened to an unprecedented extent—that Charles I and his ceremonializing archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, were the witting or unwitting instruments of a popish plot to return England to subjection to Rome.⁶⁸ Few historians would now seriously contend that religious concerns were not a major factor, or even the major factor, in the outbreak of civil conflict in the 1640s—a struggle John Morrill has famously christened “the last of the Wars of Religion.”⁶⁹ But the process by which the Calvinist consensus of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era came to unravel so badly remains a historiographical hot potato.

Nicholas Tyacke’s influential view, first formulated in 1973, that Charles’s counterrevolutionary promotion of a novel Arminian theology of grace provoked a conservative backlash has been subject to various critiques. Peter White, for example, denies that Calvinists ever held a monopoly of views about grace and salvation in the church, arguing instead for a broad spectrum of views.⁷⁰ The role of Arminianism is similarly downplayed by George Bernard, Julian Davies, and Kevin Sharpe, who see in Charles’s policies of the 1630s merely a conventional concern with order, and who are inclined to regard the meltdown of the early 1640s as a short-term crisis stemming from Charles’s 1637 decision to attempt to impose the English Prayer Book in Scotland.⁷¹ Tyacke, in turn, has accused his critics of attempting to resurrect the anachronistic notion of an Anglican via media under attack from Puritanism.⁷²

A more fruitful way forward here may be to recognize the extent to which the religious issues at stake in the 1640s had their roots in unresolved issues of the Elizabethan Reformation itself. Quarrels over whether the communion tables in churches should be placed “altarwise” or “tablewise” were fueled by the fact that the Elizabethan Prayer Book and Injunctions seemed to contradict each other over the issue, as they did over the use of wafers or ordinary bread for the communion. The oddity whereby the Elizabethan Church retained elements of Catholic structure (bishops, cathedrals, church courts) alongside its reformed theology allowed space for a ceremonialist, firmly anti-Puritan strain to survive within the dominant Calvinist ethos; Julia Merritt and Diarmaid MacCulloch have drawn attention to the importance of Westminster Abbey in the process.⁷³ Another potential time bomb was the theology of Richard Hooker (1554–1600), conventionally regarded as the quintessential Anglican theologian, but who, as Peter Lake has shown, possesses a plausible claim to have invented Anglicanism.⁷⁴ Though doctrinally Hooker was a Calvinist, his high doctrine of the church and its sacraments, and his assertions of the church’s continuity with its medieval predecessor, ran deeply counter to basic assumptions of the godly. He also raised the possibility that the contemporary Roman Church might, despite its corruptions, be a true church. Anthony Milton’s monumental study of early seventeenth-century attitudes toward Rome and other Protestant churches demonstrates the deeply divisive consequences of the abandonment in some quarters of conventional antipapist discourse.⁷⁵

For all these reasons it makes conceptual sense to roll forward the English Reformation to encompass the outbreak of the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. For one side in the conflict, the cause involved the defense of a Protestantism of conformity and order, shaped under the uniquely English institution of the royal supremacy. For the other, it represented a chance at last to implement the agenda for godly Reformation over which Elizabeth and her successors had invariably dragged their feet. Arguably, the story should be carried through to the restoration of an Anglicanism that now dared to speak its name in 1660, or to the final defeat of the political hopes of Catholicism in 1688–89. However (devotees of la longue durée excepted), historians understandably feel that if periodizations are stretched too wide, their utility as organizing concepts threatens to snap.

It is as difficult to predict the future directions of Reformation research as it must have been for the parishioners of Tudor England to predict the future directions of government policy. The impression of smoothly succeeding waves of orthodoxy/revisionism/postrevisionism in fact obscures a messier reality. Historians apply different perspectives to different issues, and much important scholarship resists easy classifications. The most significant books are sometimes the least expected. It is likely, however, that traditional disciplinary demarcations will continue to be eroded; literary scholars such as Tom Betteridge and Brian Cummings are bringing the intellectual tools of their trade to the study of the poetics and rhetorics of the Reformation, while historicist critics like Stephen Greenblatt are applying historical understanding to their reading of religious themes in canonical texts.⁷⁶ There are likely to be further insights from women’s history and gender studies, which, curiously, have to date made relatively little mark on the historiography of the English Reformation.⁷⁷ Attempting to view English religious history in its British dimension is a worthy objective: historians of the Tudor Reformations are starting to follow the lead set by seventeenth-century scholars in this direction.⁷⁸ Insofar as the linguistic abilities of scholars allow it, the wider international ramifications and connections of religious reform in England (Protestant and Catholic) should similarly continue to be pursued. It is hoped that a marked feature of the best current work in the field will continue to manifest itself. Despite the abandonment of overtly confessional frameworks of interpretation and the decline (in Britain at least) of religious faith and practice in wider society, most Reformation scholars manage to engage seriously with the worldview of their subjects and to avoid crudely reductionist and functionalist models of religious belief. This empathetic encounter with difference is the mark of the good historian.

Bibliography

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Alford, Stephen. The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

——. Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Aston, Margaret. England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

——, and Colin Richmond, eds. Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1997.

Barron, Caroline. “The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London.” In The Church in Pre-Reformation Society, edited by Caroline Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill, 13–37. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1985.

Bernard, George. “Anne Boleyn’s Religion.” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 1–20.

——. “The Church of England, c. 1529-c. 1642.” History 75 (1990): 183–206.

——. The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

——. “The Making of Religious Policy, 1533–1546: Henry VIII and the Search for the Middle Way.” Historical Journal 41 (1998): 321–49.

——. “Vitality and Vulnerability in the Late Medieval Church: Pilgrimage on the Eve of the Break with Rome.” In The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, edited by John Watts, 199–233. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1998.

Betteridge, Tom. Literature and Politics in the English Reformation. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Bossy, John. The English Catholic Community 1570–1850. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975.

Bowker, Margaret. The Henrician Reformation: The Diocese of Lincoln under John Longland 1521–1547. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Brigden, Susan. London and the Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

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